Dena Davida

Born to a family of artists in the United States, Dena Davida was trained in the  performing arts from an early age. She settled in Canada in 1977. She taught  her first courses in Québec and formed a collective dance company of contact  improvisation. She co-founded Tangente in 1980, Quebec’s first contemporary  dance venue, where she is still a curator, and the Festival international de  nouvelle danse de Montréal in 1982. She taught composition, improvisation,  Laban analysis, aesthetic, and the anthropology of dance in the dance  department of the Université du Québec à Montréal between 1985 and 2010.  In 2006 she completed a Ph.D. from UQAM with an ethnographic thesis  focusing on the nature and function of artistic dance. As the author of articles  published in professional and artistic journals, she now runs the publication  Fields in Motion: Ethnography in the Worlds of Dance (2012), in collaboration  with 26 international authors. Her current long-term project is to contribute to  developing the professionalization of the live and performing arts curation, her  own profession for 40 years. She taught the first course in Canada in this body  of knowledge at UQAM in 2014, and co-organized an international  symposium. She co-leads a second anthology in collaboration with 55 authors  titled Curating Live Arts: Critical Perspectives, Essays and Conversations on  Theory and Practice (2018). She is a recipient of the Grand Prix de Conseil  des arts de Montréal pour Tangente (2007), of the premier Prix de fondateur of  the Société canadienne d’études sur la danse (Canadian Society for Dance  Studies) (2011), and of the Prix de reconnaissance of the UQAM Faculty of  Arts (2014).